1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for managing communication sessions set-up between users.
2. Description of the Related Art
As devices that enable mobile communication are becoming more and more popular, there is an increasing need for users to control and customize their communication, based on the context in which this takes place.
As stated by R. Dinoff et al., (“Learning and Managing User Context in Personalized Communications Services”, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies—Int'l Workshop on Context in Advanced Interfaces, 23 May 2006) there is an increasing need for users to have the possibility to get called by the right people in the right way, and to be not bothered by the ones users don't want to deal with for the moment. To this purpose, R. Dinoff et al. propose an availability service which is (i) context-aware, (ii) requester-targeted, and (iii) preferences driven. By context-aware, the Authors mean that the service can take into account the end-user's current context, including dynamic information (e.g., presence on various devices, location, and current usage of devices, and more static information, such as buddy lists and relationships, calendar entries, corporate directory). By requester-targeted, the Authors mean that the answer provided may depend on the person or service that is making the availability request. By preferences driven the Authors mean that the answer provided should reflect the preferences of the end-user in connection with his current context, the request, and the requester.
For setting the user's context, the Authors propose having the system observe the user's behaviour and learn about the user's preferences by detecting usage patterns.
R. Plesa and L. Logrippo (“Enhanced communication service through context integration”, publication in MATA 2005, 2005-10) propose a combination of presence information and context information (called “consolidated presence information) to build an intelligent picture of a user's current situation, status and accessibility. For the Authors presence information include the physical location of the user (e.g., at home), call state (e.g., ready, currently on a call), the role of the user or his willingness to communicate (e.g., available, in a meeting), indicators that show if a user is logged into a network and whether he is active and the preferred medium of communication (e.g., voice, IM, e-mail). Moreover, for the Authors human related context includes information about users (e.g., their habits) or the user's social environment (e.g. co-location with others). Context related to physical environment includes location, but also infrastructure and information about surrounding resources for computation and communication.
The Authors state that said consolidated presence information allows users to dynamically set policies that govern the particulars of how they interact with each other. Introducing presence and context information provides ground for new services: context-based services (e.g., “all calls from my students will have announcement X played out”), availability (e.g., “secretaries are not available to answer enquires during lunch time”), notification (e.g., “remind me of the 3 μm group meeting if I am not already in the meeting room”) or personal addressing services (e.g., “if the call is from a person involved in project X, redirect it to the team leader”).
The Applicant notes that the above two mentioned documents focuses their attention on the called party needs.
US 2006/0205400 discloses a communication system in which a calling party mobile station is capable of automatically obtaining information on a plurality of currently available communication modes of a called party mobile station and charge rate information to enable a user of the calling party mobile station to determine which mode is to be used for communication with the called party mobile station based on the information thus obtained. As stated by US 2006/0205400, with this system the user of the calling party mobile station is given the possibility to select a communication mode by referring to information on both the communication modes supported by the called party mobile station and the unit prices, and is allowed, for example, to select a less expensive communication mode, or to select the TV telephone call mode if he/she wants to see the face of the called party.